a n x i e t y
by Cassend
Summary: 'The rotten beast in her shivers and for a second he feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It feels like there are nails creeping up his spine, he feels that thing on his skin.'


_ABC- I wanted to see if I could write something scary. WE SHALL SEE. Enjoy the horror :O. For full effect listen to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" from dead space and read this alone at 2 AM._

_I'm joking... or am I?  
><em>

_a n x i e t y_

_**you can live for days without food or water**_

_**without hope you'd probably last an hour…**_

Two sounds and they slid into the catacombs- one of weakened stone crumbling to dust, and the second, a howl as footing slipped with the sudden fissure, and both of them fell.

Down, down, down.

_Just like old times? _

_Though this time she didn't cling to him._

They didn't fall far, just far enough to swallow them up; the rocks behind them plugged the hole. Their bodies hit the stone beneath them with wet smacks, tangled mess of unorganized limbs on puddles of fossilized sludge and frost.

She staggered to stand, coughing as dust filled in her throat and blood sputtered out of her leg from the impact.

Stray rocks clattered down the vertebrae of the cave in, skidding over the frozen floor.

She gripped her wounded knee and leaned on the wall for support.

He stood and brushed the agitated dust away, sighing the debris out of his lungs, hissing it away while the stragglers amongst the rubble skipped along the ground.

They said nothing, they listened as wet sounds burbled behind the walls, thick sounds of groaning pipes.

He couldn't see anything but the lamp-like light pouring from the eyes of her mask and the dust that danced in front of them.

Other senses took root, smell- stench of body fluids and ground dust.

"Wesker, the back is a dead end."

A heel of hers clattered against ice, she stayed where she was, beacon of two bright apple-red eyes, he slowly walked towards her. His will extended, she would only work to his benefit, morphing into any prop he needed, anything he wanted.

Right now she was his eyes.

His hand hit stone with a nasty slap; solid stone.

Ages thick. Too thick to punch through.

He tried anyways.

The top chipped off with a loud crack, concrete underneath screamed and reverberated back to him through his knuckles. Nothing behind it.

It really was a dead end.

The blizzard howled overhead, sounds of wind muted, stories above them.

"We're trapped." She said.

Infuriating words that echoed over the slippery metal walls. Droplets of water, breathing…

The sound of shivering tainting steady patterns of breathing. The sound of his own pulse in his ears.

It's deafening. Repetitive.

Constant thumping- almost a second between beats.

It's a second skin of freezing crawling down throats, slipping into pores incessantly.

No one had to say it.

The tunnel squeezed them tight.

They were trapped.

_ Saliva dripped from her lips with a choke as his fingers jammed around her windpipe and he slammed her head into the wall._

_ "You tipped them off."_

_ "No-ugckk…"_

_ His hand squeezed tighter, she gagged, wet sounds._

_ "You lead them to the reserve. They didn't know we had one until you were sloppy."_

_ She was choking, her throat constricted- consonants and slippery hysterics oozing through the beak of her mask, metallic and hollow._

_ "I could kill you."_

_ She knew that too well. He came so close many times. Her blood was running cold._

_ One more squeeze and she could be vomiting the stuff. Retching out her own life, painting pretty pouted lips red._

_ Her pulse bled through his fingers, heightened._

_ Amusing._

_ He waited until her head pressed back, against the brick wall, and he could just picture her eyes rolling back while she choked- oxygen deprived, poor little thing..._

_ He sighed and threw her to the floor, watched as she clawed at air, drew breath. Such a simple construct she was- mentally deteriorating, but her body functioning enough._

_ It functioned too well._

_ He let her live again and again._

_ Though he could smell something in her head, sense it easily when it stirred._

_ Insanity?_

_ He smelled it through her skin._

_ It was a sixth sense, an animal sense that was as disturbing as it was useful._

_ He feared that thing in her, buried deep in mounds of flesh and salty sweat, because he smelled it._

_ Whatever it was, it wasn't human, not anymore._

_ And it wasn't quite dead- but it wasn't alive._

_ He frowned and watched her mechanical return to her feet, short jolts of joints, contraction and expansion of muscle fibers. Something slithered in the shadows, voices with thick accents and angry words._

_ When you are in the dirty veins of needles and smuggling, you make enemies, and typically they are resourceful._

_ "Kill them." He growls._

_ The rotten beast in her shivers and for a second he feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up._

_ It feels like there are nails creeping up his spine, he feels that thing on his skin._

_ Madness so belligerent you could practically scoop handfuls of it up._

_ And bring it to your lips to taste it._

_ She crouches and hisses as feet echo through the tunnel, there's a solid sound of guns readying…_

_ Ugly business was the business of a rich woman, a very rich woman of high class and flamboyant style._

_ "P30 exports?"_

_ "Yes."_

_ Her pretty lips curled in disgust, the room seemed to cringe at such an expression. Jill waited, waited, waited for the inevitable followup, the silent pause, ellipses preluding to the meat of her thoughts was overbearing, especially in this dimly lit lab interior. _

_ She could hear something screaming in that pause._

_ An animal…_

_ Or perhaps a human…_

_ Was there a difference?_

_ The sound was impossible to ignore, turning the ugly owl's face into an amphitheater._

_ It made her want to scream too. Cling to her head and start screaming._

_ Maybe once she started, she'd never stop._

_ "Certainly he doesn't want me to come!"_

_ The words were shaky, trembling under the surface. If they shook anymore, perhaps the woman would panic._

_ Excella heard it too. No matter what kind of air she could put up, this bothered her on a conscious level. _

_ "You are to meet with our contact."_

_ "I am not going alone!"_

_ Jill had seen panic attacks. She used to have them. Your lungs tighten up, your heart feels like someone is gripping it, pushing in, seeing if it will pop. She knew the feeling of spiraling inside yourself and being stretched by primal terror._

_ Excella's freaking out. The screams are too much. _

_ It's that guy they brought in, screaming because it hurts when the worms eat through his skin, sedated as they are and taking their time, savoring him._

_ "Excella."_

_ The woman waves her off and stands. "If you think I'm going-"_

_ "Excella."_

_ "What?"_

_ Jill leaves the room, and as expected, Excella follows her to the elevator indigently, yelling._

_ It's the nicest thing anyone will ever do for her._

_ Jill walks into the elevator, Excella stops it with a hand and smacks her across the face._

_ The mask flies off. Jill sighs at the sting, her true face painted with shadows from her hood. She really was pretty, though it was something Excella didn't want to admit._

_ Lovely in that disturbing porcelain doll kind of way._

_ The kind of doll that stares at you with glass eyes and never blinks._

_ Excella yowls and clutches her hand, the beak was too sharp for a clean smack without repercussions. A hair's width of a scratch across her palm throbs and beads of blood well up._

_ The doors close and the elevator moves._

_ They didn't know that the screaming man exploded from his prison at that moment, howling and shrieking as infectious muck spewed from the corners of his eyes, his capillaries exploding, his flesh rotting as he moved, eaten away. Majini scrambled, servants scrambled to contain the beast, but the monstrosity threw its degenerating appendages every which way._

_ Bodies were dissolved into piles of steaming rotten organs within seconds._

_ An alarm wailed, a breach had occurred in security._

_ The elevator shut down, the lights shut off and left only the blaring red glow of the word "emergency" above the doors._

_ They both gripped the handrail as the machine jolted to a stop, metallic wailing overhead as the cables braked._

_Breathing was a metronome, a constant, and without it they would have surely gone mad._

_Perhaps, just "more insane"._

'_Please evacuate all personnel on the fourth level. This is not a drill.'_

_Alarms blared, screeched._

'_Protect her', says the ticking of clock spindled in Jill's ribcage. It's like a metallic voice, grinding in her head._

'_Please evacuate all personnel on the fourth level. This is not a drill.'_

_Excella said something in her native tongue and her body sank lower to the floor._

_Hiding when there was nowhere to hide._

'_Please evacuate all personnel on the fourth lev-'_

_The elevator made a noise, a groaning noise, and there was the sound of a thumping above the suspended box._

_Something trying to get in._

_And then the trill of screaming again. The experiment soaked in flaking, cracked blood and the remains of Las Plagas organs burbled and swelled in waves, grotesque slurping flesh and worms. Whatever was left of his body provided the armature for a hellish sculpt, loose in some places._

_The metal was bending as the creature slammed itself into the shaft doors, one big pile of wriggling pandemonium._

'_Protect her' said his voice, a squirming and fat maggot munching on her rotting will. She could hear it through her memories, feel the distasteful slither of it as it burrowed deep in that place where she couldn't ignore it._

_Perhaps he was fit to rule a world of worms._

_The metal knocking became louder, a scratching echoed down to them, the shrieks were harrowing._

_Jill felt the maggot in her head._

_It thrashed and bit and burrowed._

_And she hissed and leapt to the hatch at the roof, throwing it open._

_Face to face with a monstrosity, scraps of a human body in a mass of black worms as it fell gracelessly into a puddle on the metal roof._

_ She gagged on a combination of rot and fresh bile. _

_The smell could've killed her alone. _

_ The worms tried to._

_ She drew her dual guns, but the monster impaled her through her cloak._

_She howled like a beast as her poisonous blood seeped out. Pale skin ruptured as the invaders tried to absorb her, to sap out her innards through her pores._

_ She was pulled into the mass of tendrils and promptly spat out, a thousand appendages burrowing under her skin and pulling away with a scream that seemed to make the entire foundation distort._

_ She didn't know if she screamed, or the monster._

_ Black ooze seeped from her skin, boiling with her blood. It had gone deep in all avenues, all possible ways._

_ Punctures in her cheeks, holes in her neck, ruptures in her stomach._

_ She wasn't sure how she was still standing, clumps of black sludge falling out of her with vulgar squelches._

_ Furious, the creature plucked her up and threw her into the metal wall._

_ Her vision didn't swim, it quivered. Her spine hit the metal, hands flew out to grip the edge of the elevator top._

_ Her head hit instead in the distortion._

_ She blacked out as her mouth filled with something pungent and red and bits of her own molars floated under her tongue._

_ And she fell._

_ If it wasn't for a black knight spawning from the destroyed elevator entrance- the creature would've killed his tormentor, Excella Gionne._

_ Another puppet in the game, but just as ugly as the master._

_ Jill's body fell three floors down, and hit in a bloody splatter on a cold metal floor, rolling to a stop, all limbs at unnatural angles. A pool formed around her, her eyes and mouth were gaping open, bloody._

_ Filling her gums with red until her mouth overflowed._

_ Drowning to death._

_ Wesker made short work of the faulty experiment, clothes distraught and ripped as the creature screamed and liquefied at his hands._

_ Excella clutched her hands tightly to her collarbone, her breathing was agonizingly pressured._

_ Panic attacks._

_ Coming face to face with the possibility of death, of horrors she helped create._

_ His thin lips creased into a frown and he was disgusted at the scent of cold sweat and the taste of fear, the overwhelming disease of Uroborus dancing wildly in his nose. The smells made his head throb._

_ Excella shook as he dropped from the ceiling, monstrous man, but savior. And she stood to run to him, shaking._

_ "Where is Jill?"_

_ Her fears magnified and held her instead, for he certainly held no sympathy._

_ "She went out to fight that thing- Albert wai-!"_

_ He was already gone, leaving her with burning red letters, leaving her alone with her mind._

_ Jill's blood wafted from the dark like steam, somewhere at the bottom of this well._

_** 'and Jill came tumbling after?'**_

_ The corpse stared heavenward with a grisly smile._

_ There was something in the dark._

_ As horrifying as him._

_ She unconsciously blew blood bubbles in her throat as his fingers dipped under her broken back to peel her from the floor._

Shivering has a sound, he realized, very quickly in the dark.

_ "..hhh…hhh….hhhhahh…"_

The only sound louder than consistent drops of water on the ground was her shivering, magnified by the horror of a mask on her face. She shivers and her teeth chatter, clinking sounds.

Down in a hole, he supposed- and he can't see a thing but the damn eyes of that mask.

They glow and he has the urge to rip that crow's lenses out.

That thing is _watching_ him.

He can't help the choice of words- and that's disturbing.

She's Jill to everyone who knows, just a name, but internally he calls her "that thing".

Because it's not Jill watching him, Jill's not here and she hasn't been for a long, long time.

It's _that thing._

It's the painting in the dark that follows you wherever you move, just watching… and waiting?

"Take off your mask, Jill." He orders.

A rustle of fabrics and the red eyes disappear under her thick, probably saturated with ice water and muck, cowl.

The shivering continues.

Somehow the emptiness is better without those eyes. It's more neutral to look at one single color, consequently his favorite color, black.

Soon Excella is going to come, faithful lapdog she is, and rescue them from this miserable place, warm them up and coddle them- throw herself at him because of human folly.

Jill keeps shivering, he can hear her entire body shuddering against the icy wall, constant scratches of fabric.

Sounding exactly like white noise.

It's almost comforting that the sounds are consistent.

_ 'Like a heartbeat for the tunnels.'_

_ A thought not his own…_

His eyes close in meditative wordlessness and he listens to her sordid lullaby of mute pains. He's just agitated.

He tells himself that and sits on the folds of his jacket in the dark listening.

"…nn…._what_?" she murmurs, confused, as if she didn't hear… something?

He said nothing.

His eyes open a margin as if it would help, but he feels the hair on the back of his neck prickle because she's completely silent for a moment.

He goes to speak, tongue against his lips in a snarl already, but her trembling starts again and the moment passes.

He doesn't close his eyes in case, and while logic tells him that it wouldn't make a difference, something else- maybe it's the tunnel- inclines him to not to.


End file.
